I arrived in Swaziland on Sunday 15th September at noon. I had 100 kg checked in luggage in 4 packs. The customs cleared with no issue, but took about an hour. I picked up the hire car and drove 90 km to Mbabane. I set the antenna on the following day on Monday. Unfortunately the noise level is S8-S9+ on all bands. The noise is coming from the power line therefor nothing to do much to eliminate it. I can’t hear any signal on CW. Only the FT8 the usable mode. Tuesday, next week I will move to another, hopefully less noisy location and I do hope I will be able to work on CW.
I received many feedback and complains about the FT8 F/H operation. My signal report and RR 73 confirmation are not sent in F/H mode. I checked everything many times and I waisted lots of precious time for troubleshooting. The first two days i used WSJT-X v2.1 on Win10Pro 64bit. Second day I changed to the 2.0 on the same laptop. Yesterday I used my backup laptop with Win7Pro 32 bit. Also tried both 2.1 and 2.0 WSJT-X in this platform.
The result is the same. It does not send the report and RR 73 confirmation in F/H mode. In the normal mode it works as expected. At least I did not get complains. This morning I received emails informing me that the 3DA prefix non-standard in WSJT-X term and will not work in F/H mode. (Thank you for the help in troubleshooting to Jim AB3CV, Bill G4WJS, George HA5UK and Vatsa VU2AE).
However the strong S9+ noise also may resulting broken decoding and many cases I can’t see If the station sent me report. This is why I need to send report many times to be able to complete the QSO.
All these, the noise level and issue with WSJT-X make the HAM community very much disappointed and frustrated like me too
